Vane Pursuit Read online

“Cat, for goodness’ sake! I’ve been eating all day!”

  “That’s beside the point.”

  “True enough,” Helen conceded. “I expect I’ll be able to eat when you get around to serving, but don’t hurry on my account. What’s Guthrie’s wife like? Or doesn’t he have one?”

  “Oh, yes. She’s seven feet tall and has a beard.”

  “You’re making that up.”

  “Certainly I am. She’s less then seven feet tall and has only a small mustache. Her name is Elisa Alicia and she makes wreaths of dried apples and pillows filled with bulrush fuzz.”

  “What for?”

  “I’ve often wondered. Elisa Alicia also brews potions and decoctions. Two months ago, I asked her for a charm against publishers. She promised to get right to work on it, but so far she hasn’t come up with anything.”

  Cat picked a ferny sprig of young tansy. “Well, you can’t hit a home run every time, I suppose. Elisa Alicia’s coltsfoot poultice is said to be highly efficacious, but I forget what it’s supposed to cure. Tansy applied externally to the sexual organs is said to promote fertility. The Indians used to bind it around their heads to cure the hangovers induced by the colonists. Do you suppose there might be some connection?”

  “Anything’s possible,” Helen replied cautiously. “I’m not much up on tansy. Did you learn this stuff from Mrs. Fingal?”

  “Ms. Quatrefages, if you please. Elisa Alicia is her own woman.”

  “She doesn’t sound much like yours. Elisa Alicia Quatrefages… I’ve heard that name before. I wish I could remember where. Have she and Guthrie been here long? Do the students call him Woody?”

  “Of course. He’s not bad on the guitar, actually. We’ll get him to sing “The Wabash Cannonball” when he knows you a little better. Guthrie was born in Sasquamahoc and never left, except when he was off to college. He came back and worked in the forestry service for a while, taught at the school for several years, and stepped into the presidency when his predecessor got felled, as they say in silvicultural circles. I forget whether old Prexy was hit by a falling limb or succumbed to Dutch elm disease. It was something arboreal, anyway. As to how Guthrie acquired Elisa, I couldn’t say. The general assumption among the locals is that he went out on a field trip and found her under a rock.”

  Helen chuckled. “Cat, you’re a dreadful woman. Can’t you think of something good to say about Elisa?”

  “Yes, I can. The good thing about Elisa is that she’s not around here much. As soon as the moon turns gibbous, she packs up her accumulated wreaths and pillows and tootles off to Boston or New York. To peddle them, she claims. I personally suspect she does a brisk little sideline business in murrains and blights among the upwardly mobile. However, I shan’t expand on my theory. I can see you’ve come all over sweetness and light since your nuptials. Whatever happened to the mordacious Marsh of yesteryear?”

  “What’s happened to Iduna is more to the point.” They were within sight of Catriona’s house by now. “I don’t see her on the terrace.”

  “I hope the black flies haven’t got her.” Catriona quickened her pace. “Those blasted things chomp a hunk out of you, then you swell up in agony for a week and have scars on your soul forever after.”

  However, they found Iduna unchomped and unswollen. What had enticed her inside the house was obviously the telephone. She was talking into it when they entered.

  “Oops, here they are now. I’ll put her on the line. It’s Peter, Helen.”

  “Good, I was hoping he’d call.”

  While Iduna went with Catriona into the kitchen, Helen took the receiver. “Hello, darling. What’s happening?”

  “Huntley Swope’s conscious and sticking to his soldier story, but nobody seems to be buying it. The God-awful soapsuds around the factory are boiling up higher by the minute, and so is public feeling.”

  “What do you yourself think?”

  “Drat it, Helen, how can Huntley be lying? He doesn’t know Brinkley’s getting the blame for starting the fire. Nobody’s been allowed to see him except his wife and the hospital staff, and they’ve surely had sense enough not to say anything that might have upset him. According to his wife, Huntley tells a perfectly clear story. He says he’d been downstairs telling Caspar Flum to send up another batch of grease or some damned thing. The intricacies of soapmaking are beyond my grasp. Anyway, he was on his way back to his office and stopped at a window in the corridor just outside the tallow room.”

  “Wanted a breath of fresh air, I suppose,” Helen prompted. “I noticed when I was taking my photos that all the windows were open and they hadn’t any screens. I wondered how they kept the bugs out of the soap. Sorry, Peter. What then?”

  “As he was standing there trying to get some of the fat out of his lungs, he noticed a youngish fellow with what he describes as soldierly bearing, wearing what appeared to be army fatigues with the pantlegs tucked into high boots, paratrooper style, walking briskly down the road. When he got parallel with the tallow room, the man didn’t even look in, just whipped something out of his pocket and flipped it sideways through the window.”

  “Could Huntley see what he flipped?”

  “No,” Peter answered, “but he has an impression it was approximately the size of a lemon. He was all set to yell at the man when he heard a tremendous bang and saw flames spurting out the window next to the one he was looking from. He ran back to haul Flum out, but the doorway was a wall of flames. It doesn’t seem to remember much after that, poor fellow, till he woke up in the hospital.”

  “Had he been able to get a good look at the soldier?”

  “Not really. It was dark by then, of course. The factory windows cast some light on the road, but it doesn’t seem to have helped a great deal. He thinks the man was beardless and had his hair cut short, but that’s the best he can do. Nobody’s son was home on leave and nobody recalls having seen a stray military man around, so naturally they all think Huntley’s making up a yarn to protect his brother.”

  “But there’s no reason for him to tell a lie if he doesn’t know his brother needs protecting,” Helen protested. “Can’t people see that?”

  “They can’t believe he doesn’t know. It’ll straighten itself out sooner or later, I suppose. Did you get your photographs all right?”

  “Yes, dear, no problem. I shan’t know how good they are till I get the films developed, and this doesn’t look like the kind of place where I’d be able to do that in a hurry, but I used both cameras, so one of them must surely have worked. We saw your old friend Guthrie Fingal. He’s awfully nice, Peter.” Helen thought perhaps she wouldn’t say anything about the as yet unseen Mrs. Fingal. “Oh, Peter, a funny thing happened. I was upstairs in one of the dormitories so that I could be at eye level with the weather vane, you know.”

  She decided further not to mention that she’d been at the top of a fire escape. Peter did have some quaint ideas about the frangibility of wives. Cat would be amused, no doubt.

  “Anyway, a couple of students, I suppose they were, happened to be talking in the next room and one of them said something about Woeful Ridge. I asked Woody where it was, but neither he nor Cat had ever heard of the place. Wasn’t that an odd coincidence? You remember Cronkite Swope mentioned Woeful Ridge last night when he came to the house?”

  “Yes, I remember.”

  They talked a little while longer, but Helen thought Peter sounded somewhat abstracted toward the end. He must have been thinking about something else. She wondered what it was.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Peter was wondering, too. He wondered while he walked up to the faculty dining room and consumed a no-doubt excellent meal without noticing what he was eating. He wondered on his way back home and continued his musing as he watched the early news, the local part of which consisted mostly of dirty soapsuds. He was still wondering when Cronkite Swope slunk up to the door, steeped in gloom.

  “Can I come in for a while, Professor?”

  “Gad, Swope,
you look like a one-man funeral.” Peter ushered him into the living room. “Nothing direful on the home front, I hope?”

  “Not specially.” The young newspaperman sank into the easy chair that was usually Helen’s and took Jane Austen on his lap for solace. “It’s just that I’m not used to being treated like a skunk at a wedding. Over in Lumpkinton I can’t even interview the man in the street without getting my head chewed off.”

  “Bad as that, eh?”

  “Worse. I went to Clavaton and tried to dig a story out of Mr. Snell. All he’d say were things like ‘I have no information at this time’ and That will have to be decided by our board of directors.’ The only piece of information I got out of him was that he didn’t even know the factory was on fire till it was all over. He’d been in West Clavaton the whole time playing his bass viol with some chamber music group he belongs to. I wrote it up with the headline ‘Snell Fiddles While Factory Burns,’ but my editor killed it. He’s afraid Snell will take away his advertising if the factory ever gets going again.”

  “The ways of editors are beyond our ken, Swope. Any more news on your brother?”

  “Hunt’s about the same, last I heard. Brink’s had to board up his windows and evacuate his wife and kids to her folks’ house in Hoddersville. Mum’s cousins Clarence and Silvester Lomax are guarding Brink’s place so a mob doesn’t burn it down while he’s gone. I don’t know what to do, Professor.”

  “Then might I suggest taking a ride out to Woeful Ridge?”

  Cronkite was surprised. “I guess so, if you want to. How come Woeful Ridge?”

  “Because I’ve lived in Balaclava County upward of twenty years and never been near the place, but you’re the third person who’s mentioned it in the past twenty-four hours, so now must be the time. What’s it like?”

  “Scroungy and desolate. Rocks and weeds, mostly. The kind of place that makes you feel like sitting down and having a good cry. Don’t ask me why, it just seems to hit everybody that way. You weren’t planning to blow your brains out or anything?”

  “By no means, Swope. My wife wouldn’t stand for it.”

  “And you have Jane to think of.” Cronkite tickled the white bib under the little tiger lady’s chin, patently relieved to evoke a purr instead of a growl for a change. “Want to go now? We can take the staff car to save getting yours out.”

  “Have you eaten?”

  “My mother made a pot of chicken soup to take to Huntley, but the hospital says he can’t have any, so she’s making me eat it instead. Every time I drop in at the house to use the phone, she shoves another bowlful at me. I had two at noontime and three more since then, so I’m not particularly hungry. If I were, I could probably lay myself an egg by now. If you’re really serious about Woeful Ridge, Professor, I think we ought to be shoving along. The place isn’t much in the daylight and I expect it’d be nothing at all in the dark. Besides, I think the were-wolves come out then.”

  The Balaclava Fane and Pennon’s staff car was a 1974 Plymouth Valiant, not much for looks by now but still capable of forward motion, so forward they went. The motion continued a good deal longer than Peter had bargained for.

  “What a dull road. I hadn’t realized Massachusetts could come up with such a long stretch of nothing in particular.”

  “It gets duller as we go along,” Cronkite assured him, and sure enough, it did.

  “Those survivalists you mentioned last night certainly haven’t picked much of a place to survive in,” Peter observed after a while. “What do they do out here?”

  “Get closer to the earth. At least that’s what one of them told me when I tried to get an interview out of him. He emphasized his point by ever so accidentally knocking me down and rubbing my face in the dirt while six or eight other creeps stood around laughing themselves sick. I expect what they mainly do is sit around and drink beer and tell each other lies about what big macho he-men they are. I don’t expect we’ll see anybody there tonight. They’re pretty much weekend survivors as far as I know. If I haven’t got my signals crossed, this is where we turn off.”

  The dirt road wasn’t really fit for anything but all-terrain vehicles, but the staff Plymouth did its best. Damn shame to have put the brave old hack to the trouble, Peter decided when he got his first sight of Woeful Ridge. The place would have made a pretty fair setting for one of Thomas Hardy’s gloomier novels, he thought. There didn’t look to be much else it was good for.

  As they left the car and began scrambling through the weeds and over the rocks, Peter amended his first impression. This granite hogback, its north side eroded by time and weather into a natural escarpment, would make an excellent place to crouch behind if one happened to be into guerrilla warfare and had anybody out front to shoot at. For want of anything better to do, he began searching the grounds behind the exposed rock. It was bare—not a twig, not a pebble, not so much as a bug.

  “What are you looking for, Professor?” Cronkite asked.

  “I don’t know, Swope, but what I’m finding is nothing at all, which strikes me as being rather peculiar. You’d think someone had gone over this place with a vacuum cleaner.”

  “Maybe the survivalists don’t want to mess up the environment.”

  “The hell they don’t.”

  Peter was really curious now. He was running his hands over the rock, and finding a couple of chipped-out grooves into which dirt had been carefully rubbed so they wouldn’t look too fresh. Kneeling, he took a beeline sight through one of them into the trees that surrounded the ridge. Then he walked down the escarpment, straight toward one tree he’d picked as his mark.

  “Look up there, Swope. They’ve been doing some target practice lately.”

  “Well, sure, what would you expect? They’re probably all hunters, or think they are. Get half a skinful and stand out here blazing away with their deer rifles just for the heck of it.”

  “Whoever did this wasn’t just blazing away.”

  Peter had his field glasses up to his eyes, studying a large knot that looked as if it might have been hollowed out by woodpeckers. In fact, the center had been systematically chipped away by bullets, not one of which had strayed into the periphery.

  “Here, take the glasses and see for yourself. That’s expert sharpshooting. And they’ve picked up all the shells and swept out any sign that they’ve even been here. Of course if they’d been a little smarter, they’d have strewn an armload of leaves and trash around to make the place look more natural.”

  “Gosh, yes.” Cronkite swept Peter’s binoculars in an arc. “Looks as if that whole grove’s been attacked by a squadron of trained woodpeckers.”

  “I’ll bet you’d find a spent rifle bullet at the back of every hole. What’s down the back side of the ridge, do you know, Swope?”

  “Not a heck of a lot that I can remember. There used to be a cave, but it didn’t amount to much.”

  “Can you find it?”

  “I guess so, only we’ll probably have to fight our way through a lot of squirrel briars.”

  Interestingly enough, they didn’t. There was a path, so well camouflaged as to be invisible to anybody who didn’t know the terrain, but easy enough to get through once one knew it was there. Cronkite had no trouble leading Peter to the cave.

  “It isn’t much of one,” he apologized. “Only about four feet deep.”

  “Let’s make sure, shall we?”

  Peter had had some experience in caves with more to them than met the eye. (The Curse of the Giant Hogweed 1985).He poked around, scrutinized a part of the back wall that appeared to be one thick slab of solid rock, put his shoulder to the nearer edge, and shoved. The cave was more than four feet deep.

  “Neat,” he observed. “Must be on a pivot. Looks as if somebody’s been doing some blasting here. You wouldn’t happen to have a flashlight on you, Swope?”

  “Sure, Professor. It says in the Great Journalists’ Correspondence Course, lesson thirty-seven, that an investigative journalist should never be
without one because you never know. Sorry it’s just a pocket flash. I have a battery lantern in the car if you want me to run down and get it.”

  “No, this will do.” Peter flipped the switch. “Great balls of fire!”

  “You can say that again,” breathed Cronkite. “What the heck is it, some kind of ammunition dump?”

  “I’d call it an arsenal.”

  Peter stared in near-total disbelief at the rifles, machine guns, flamethrowers, and World War II bazookas that hung from racks spiked into the stone walls. Heavy cartons of ammunition and explosives were stacked on wooden pallets to keep them up oft the damp floor. He and the reporter were checking them over with the help of Cronkite’s flashlight when they realized they were not alone.

  “Freeze!”

  Cronkite Swope jumped about a foot and a half. “Huh?”

  “I said freeze, creepo. One move and I’ll blow your fuckin’ head off.”

  “And your own as well.” Peter had managed to swivel himself around so that he was halfway facing the burly lout in the commando suit. “Don’t you realize what a ricocheting bullet could do among all this live ammunition?”

  “Who cares? I’d die a fuckin’ hero.”

  “You’d die a mess of raw hamburger and your fellow thugs would spit on whatever bits and pieces they could find. Do you think they’d waste any hero-worship on a fool who’d been stupid enough to destroy what they must have gone to a great deal of trouble to steal?”

  Peter added a contemptuous snort for good measure. “Cozy little place you’ve got here. Mind taking us to your leader? I believe that’s the correct thing to say in situations like this.”

  “I think it’s name, rank, and serial number, Professor,” Cronkite murmured. “Do you suppose it would be all right if we just showed him our library cards?”

  “Okay, wise guys,” barked their captor. “Outside.”

  “May I point out, sir,” Peter reminded him, “that you’re blocking the exit?”

  “Huh? Oh.” The man with the gun took a step backward. “Come out with your hands up and no funny stuff.”